Yes, Myleene you ARE mum to the babes you’ve lost

Myleene Klass’s revelation that she is ‘Mama to seven children’ is confusing. She has two daughters by her ex-husband and a son by her current partner. By anyone’s calculation that’s three kids.

But she was including in her family the four babies she miscarried. She told of the trauma she suffered, describing the souls she lost as her ‘four little stars in the sky’.

Is Myleene right to consider herself a mother of seven? Should she not move on, be grateful for her daughters Ava, 13, and Hero, nine, and her year-old son Apollo?

I’ve never considered myself a mum, even though my only pregnancy was ectopic and never came to term. And only some friends who have miscarried say they are mothers of the children they have lost.

One in four pregnancies end in miscarriage, and I’d vouch that by far the majority of women who suffered them do not consider they are ‘mothers’ because of them. This is not to diminish their agony, their sense of grief and bereavement — it’s simply how these women coped.

yet Myleene’s bold claim of motherhood of her unborn babies should be heard loud and clear. For it highlights the sanctity of life and the utter misery we feel when that life is extinguished, however tender the age. During a routine scan to check the development of the first baby she lost, she said, ‘the familiar black and blue image of my baby sprung on to the screen, started to sink and slowly floated down, till it was just hunched over. I knew’.

Three more miscarriages were to come, each leaving her devastated. ‘Having everything one minute, a name, a school, then nothing.’

By speaking with such raw candour, she gives us a new and nuanced perspective in the polarised abortion debate. The arguments have become so acrimonious, so dogmatic, that a woman’s attachment to the growing child inside her, and that overwhelming sense of motherhood, is too often ignored.

Myleene seems determined to change that. The pro-choice lobby may not like it, but her choice — to proclaim to the world that she is the mother to those children she lost — deserves nothing but our respect.